If your Sponsored Products campaigns feel like they've been doing something weird lately, you're not imagining it. Two changes have landed in the past few weeks that affect how SP campaigns target shoppers and where they can run. Neither one got a big announcement. Both are worth knowing about before Prime Day kicks off tomorrow.
Broad Match Isn't Behaving Like Broad Match Anymore
Sellers and agency teams started flagging this in the forums earlier this month. Amazon appears to have updated how Sponsored Products broad match targeting works, and the shift is significant. Broad match is now prioritizing root category relevance over specific search term intent.
Here's a concrete example from the forums: a campaign targeting "5080 pc," a search associated with a high-end gaming PC costing over $3,000, is now matching to the general term "desktop computer." Previously, both words had to be present in the customer's search. Now Amazon's AI is dropping the specific qualifier and treating the product as a general category substitute.
That's a meaningful change in behavior. Broad match has always cast a wide net, but the expectation was that it would at least require the presence of the core words. If Amazon's AI is now deciding that "5080 pc" and "desktop computer" are interchangeable from a category standpoint, it's going to pull in a lot of low-intent traffic at high-intent bids.
The practical response from sellers who've caught this is to migrate broad match keywords to phrase match and monitor search term reports closely. That's the right move. Phrase match still requires the core term to appear in the search, which gives you the specificity that broad match no longer reliably provides.
What This Means for Prime Day
The timing here is uncomfortable. Prime Day starts tomorrow, which means CPCs are already elevated and traffic quality variations are harder to separate from normal event-level noise. If you're running broad match campaigns and haven't looked at your search term reports recently, now is the time.
You're looking for search terms that don't contain your core keyword words or that clearly belong to a different product category. If you find them, add them as negatives immediately. Don't wait for the weekly optimization cycle. During a four-day event with compressed conversion windows, a broad match campaign matching to wrong-intent traffic can burn budget fast.
You can also get ahead of this by reviewing your campaign structure, specifically whether any broad match keywords are in the same ad groups as exact and phrase. If you're mixing match types, the broad match behavior change affects the whole ad group's efficiency, not just the broad terms in isolation.
The New Off-Amazon Toggle in Bulksheets
Separately, Amazon added a new column to Sponsored Products bulksheets on June 8. It's called "Off-Amazon ad serving" and it gives US advertisers a direct way to control whether their SP campaigns serve ads on third-party sites outside of Amazon's owned properties.
Before this, toggling off-Amazon placement required going into each campaign individually in the Ads Console. For accounts with dozens or hundreds of campaigns, that was a slow, manual process. The new bulksheets column lets you update off-Amazon behavior across multiple campaigns in a single spreadsheet upload, using the same three-column structure the rest of the bulk operations tool uses.
This matters if you've been letting off-Amazon placements run by default. Off-site placements have always been an optional SP feature, and many sellers leave them on without reviewing performance. The new column makes it straightforward to audit and adjust at scale, which is particularly useful if you want tighter control over spend during a high-stakes event like Prime Day.
The Bigger Pattern
These two changes aren't unrelated. Amazon is gradually moving Sponsored Products toward a model where its AI makes more of the targeting decisions, and advertisers have more bulk-management tools to control where the spend goes. The broad match behavior change is the AI taking more latitude. The off-Amazon bulksheets column is Amazon giving advertisers a faster lever to pull back when the AI's choices don't match their goals.
The implication for listing quality and content is also worth noting. If Amazon's broad match AI is making category-level relevance decisions rather than keyword-level ones, your product's category classification, title structure, and backend attributes are feeding those decisions. Clean catalog data isn't just an SEO concern anymore; it's an ads targeting concern too.
If you want to do a quick audit of your SP campaigns before Prime Day traffic peaks, we're happy to take a look. Schedule a call and we can walk through your match type structure, search term report, and off-Amazon settings in one conversation.